Plants

Zone 8 is the sweet spot most herb gardeners are quietly hoping for without realizing it. This is where the classic Mediterranean herb palette, rosemary, bay laurel, French lavender, actually gets to behave the way people picture it behaving: planted once, left alone, treated as permanent landscape rather than a seasonal project. There’s no cold-hardy … Read more

Zone 10 flips the entire herb-growing conversation on its head. Everywhere colder, the whole exercise is about which plants can survive winter. Here, winter barely exists, frosts are rare or nonexistent, and the real question becomes which herbs can survive summer, since the same heat and humidity that lets ginger and turmeric live in the … Read more

Zone 4 doesn’t leave much room for negotiation. Winters here can bottom out at negative 30 to negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and that kind of cold ends the conversation for a lot of herbs before it even starts. There’s no cold-hardy rosemary cultivar tucked against a wall that’s making it through that, no French tarragon … Read more

Zone 6 sits in an odd, in-between spot for herb gardening. Winters here dip to between negative 10 and 0 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to kill the Mediterranean herbs that thrive further south, but mild enough that a handful of borderline plants make it through most years if you give them the right spot. That … Read more

There’s a specific kind of relief that comes with gardening in Zone 9: you stop digging things up. Somewhere north of you, a gardener is hauling a rosemary shrub into the garage before the first hard freeze, or wrapping a bay laurel in burlap and praying it survives the winter in a pot by a … Read more

Types of palm trees in California span a considerably wider range than most people assume, since the state is only naturally home to a single native species. Calscape, the California Native Plant Society’s plant database, says that the California fan palm is the only palm native to the western United States and the country’s largest … Read more

Perennial herbs that grow in Zone 5 have to survive winter temperatures that can drop to between negative 20 and negative 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and according to University of Illinois Extension, hardy perennials like chives, lovage, lavender, salad burnet, French tarragon, winter savory, and mint are genuinely well suited to surviving that cold in the … Read more

Spices that are good for dogs make up a considerably shorter list than the spice rack most people cook with, and getting the distinction wrong can genuinely harm a pet. According to reporting on canine nutrition from Bow Wow Labs, garlic and onion, whether raw, cooked, or powdered, damage a dog’s red blood cells and … Read more

Spices that grow in cold climates represent a genuinely narrower category than most people expect, since the majority of the world’s most famous spices, including cinnamon, black pepper, nutmeg, and cardamom, are tropical plants that can’t survive outside USDA Hardiness Zones 9 through 12. According to House Digest’s reporting on home spice gardening, black pepper … Read more

N/B: This is a neutral article about cannabis that focuses on history, legal status, health effects and botanical classification, it is not a promotional or strain-selection content for marijuana. Types of marijuana strains fall into a genetic history that traces back thousands of years, and according to the cannabis education resource Verilife, cannabis genetics can … Read more